Author: tgifreytag

Traveling Light

I’m only leaving you
for a handful of days,
but it feels as though
I’ll be gone forever—
the way the door closes

behind me with such solidity,
the way my suitcase
carries everything
I’d need for an eternity
of traveling light.

I’ve left my hotel number
on your desk, instructions
about the dog
and heating dinner. But
like the weather front

they warn is on its way
with its switchblades
of wind and ice,
our lives have minds
of their own.

---

Hello Friends —

Sometimes when writing a poem, you discover the words have minds of their own. For me, the title poem from Linda Pastan‘s 2011 collection Traveling Light (2011) documents one of those moments of discovery. “For an eternity” and “traveling light” are two completely ordinary, everyday phrases we use when describing travel. And yet, when the two phrases are combined, they evoke an extra layer of imagery: in the context of “eternity,” “light” can also be read as a noun, as in rays of light traveling through the eternal blackness of outerspace — giving the reader a visual equivalent for what it feels like when “it feels as though / I’ll be gone forever.” When I get to that “traveling light” image in this poem, I feel a sudden joyful leaping out of the page, like I’ve just bounced on a trampoline that zoomed me from the tiny black of inked letters all the way out to the infinite blackness at the limits of outerspace, and then quickly back again — wheeee! — that delightful sensation of words becoming more than the sum of their parts, becoming poetry.

April is National Poetry Month, and I am celebrating by emailing out one poem per day for the duration of the month. I love hearing when you love a poem, or hate a poem, or have a thought or a question about a poem — so please do hit reply, or leave a comment on the blog, meetmein811.blogspot.com. You are also welcome to nominate a poem or poet to be included. You can also learn more about National Poetry Month at www.poets.org, the website of the Academy of American Poets.

Enjoy.
Ellen

Dear Friends,

Some things are very different for me this April: I am divorced, relocated, unemployed, and uninsured — in a period of great transition in my life, in every sense of the word. But some things are the same: April is still National Poetry Month, and I’m as determined as ever to celebrate it by sharing with all of you a bit of what I love about poetry — via one poem per day, delivered to your email inbox, for the duration of the month: 30 days. 30 poems. 30 poets.

No prior poetry experience is required! Enthusiasm, ability to read, and web access are the only prerequisites.

For the first time, I have also converted my poem-a-day email series to a blog: you can now find the archives for the past five years of poem-a-days here at meetmein811.blogspot.com. You are welcome to send friends and family who would like to join the poem-a-day list to the blog. As always, you can also learn more about National Poetry Month at the website of the Academy of American Poets, www.poets.org.

So, again, Happy National Poetry Month! And thank you for celebrating with me.

Love, Ellen

Now, for today’s poem-a-day: Sometimes a scene, a tableau, a moment frozen in the mind, strikes a writer as inherently poetic not because of what’s there, but because the scene illustrates so precisely what is not there. A tableau, a poetic moment, can become a poem, and today’s poem-a-day is one of those — a poem about what is not there. Enjoy.

---

The night she walked to the house
she held a string; on the other end,
fifty-three feet in the air, a kite.
Wind provided the aerodynamics.
Does every collaboration
need to be explained?
She tied the string to the mailbox
left the kite to float until morning.
Every night this happens.
She sleeps, I listen, darkness
slides through us both.

The next morning
the string still curved into the sky
but the kite was gone.
This was the morning
newspapers announced
the Mona Lisa was stolen.
This was the morning
it snowed in Los Angeles,
the morning I wore gloves
to pull from the sky
fifty-three feet of frozen string.

---

“The Aerodynamics” by Rick Bursky from Death Obscura (2010)

The Poem Said
By Franz Wright

The poem said never love anything
Not even you?
I asked
and it answered

especially me

If you must, love

not living
with hope

or not living

taste this
and remember

not yet being—

Especially me

I am just you

If you must, like
and coldly admire my cold stars
shit for brains
love what I stand for

not me

the leopard the beautiful
death
who puts on his spotted robe when he goes
to his chosen,
the

what was the not now the what will be

Like suddenly using a dead friend’s expression

Make yourself useful
while there is time

while there is still light and time

---

Hello Friends,

Well, we’re running short on both light and time for National Poetry Month 2011. But the good news is, the poems are still there, all around you, all the time, if you look for them.

My hope is that a poem or two has spoken to you over the past month. Maybe you even got to ask a poem or two a question.

I thank you for humoring me in this April ritual. And if a particular poem or two from the past 30 days did stick with you, and you feel inspired to dive deeper, here are some places to start. You can also now find all of this month’s poem-a-days (and April 2010, April 2009, April 2008, and April 2007) migrated here to meetmein811.blogspot.com.

Cheers,
Ellen

Hello Friends —
I’m going to subject you to a longer poem today, cuz it’s just so darn gorgeous. So I’ll mostly avoid making this email any longer with explanations, except to point out this poem contains 12 hyphens, or 13 if you include the title…as well as several additional instances of compound adjectives that could be hypenated but aren’t.

---

WOOFER (WHEN I CONSIDER THE AFRICAN-AMERICAN)

When I consider the much discussed dilemma
of the African-American, I think not of the diasporic
middle passing, unchained, juke, jock, and jiving
sons and daughters of what sleek dashikied poets
and tether fisted Nationalists commonly call Mother
Africa, but of an ex-girlfriend who was the child
of a black-skinned Ghanaian beauty and Jewish-
American, globetrotting ethnomusicologist.
I forgot all my father’s warnings about meeting women
at bus stops (which is the way he met my mother)
when I met her waiting for the rush hour bus in October
because I have always been a sucker for deep blue denim
and Afros and because she spoke so slowly
when she asked the time. I wrote my phone number
in the back of the book of poems I had and said
something like “You can return it when I see you again”
which has to be one of my top two or three best
pickup lines ever. If you have ever gotten lucky
on a first date you can guess what followed: her smile
twizzling above a tight black v-neck sweater, chatter
on my velvet couch and then the two of us wearing nothing
but shoes. When I think of African-American rituals
of love, I think not of young, made-up unwed mothers
who seek warmth in the arms of any brother
with arms because they never knew their fathers
(though that could describe my mother), but of that girl
and me in the basement of her father’s four story Victorian
making love among the fresh blood and axe
and chicken feathers left after the Thanksgiving slaughter
executed by a 3-D witchdoctor houseguest (his face
was starred by tribal markings) and her ruddy American
poppa while drums drummed upstairs from his hi-fi woofers
because that’s the closest I’ve ever come to anything
remotely ritualistic or African, for that matter.
We were quiet enough to hear their chatter
between the drums and the scraping of their chairs
at the table above us and the footsteps of anyone
approaching the basement door and it made
our business sweeter, though I’ll admit I wondered
if I’d be cursed for making love under her father’s nose
or if the witchdoctor would sense us and then cast a spell.
I have been cursed, broken hearted, stunned, frightened
and bewildered, but when I consider the African-American
I think not of the tek nines of my generation deployed
by madness or that we were assigned some lousy fate
when God prescribed job titles at the beginning of Time
or that we were too dumb to run the other way
when we saw the wide white sails of the ships
since given the absurd history of the world, everyone
is a descendant of slaves (which makes me wonder
if outrunning your captors is not the real meaning of Race?).
I think of the girl’s bark colored, bi-continental nipples
when I consider the African-American.
I think of a string of people connected one to another
and including the two of us there in the basement
linked by a hyphen filled with blood;
linked by a blood filled baton in one great historical relay.

---

By Terrance Hayes from Wind in a Box (2006)

Death is a beautiful car parked only
to be stolen on a street lined with trees
whose branches are like the intestines
   of an emerald.

You hotwire death, get in, and drive away
like a flag made from a thousand burning
   funeral parlors.

You have stolen death because you’re bored.
There’s nothing good playing at the movies
   in San Francisco.

You joyride around for a while listening
to the radio, and then abandon death, walk
away, and leave death for the police
   to find.

---

Disclaimer: The curator of this poem-a-day list shall not be held liable for any carjackings or other illicit actions arising from the reading of this or any other (untitled) poem from Richard Brautigan’s The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster (1968).

Brautigan dedicates this poem “For Emmett” — Brautigan’s close friend had recently entered into a rehab facility, and one interpretation of this poem is that it is about leaving an addiction behind. There is a particular street lined with trees out at Pt. Reyes (one of my favorite places on earth, and where Emmett’s rehab facility was located) that I always picture when I picture “the intestines of an emerald” — that facility is gone, but the trees are still there:

[Photo by David Ramage]

“Death is a beautiful car parked only” by Richard Brautigan was also featured for Poem-a-Day April 11, 2007.